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Two 8ECM Plenary Speakers are among winners for 2020 ERC’s annual Advanced Grants

Alice Guionnet and János Pach are this year’s recipients of the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant!

The 185 winners of the European Research Council’s annual Advanced Grants competition for 2020 were announced two days ago, among them Alice Guionnet and János Pach, who are this year’s Plenary speakers at the 8ECM.

Out of 185 winners, 82 grants were awarded to Physical Sciences and Engineering, 9 of which are from the PE1 panel (mathematics). The ERC’s Advanced Grants are awarded to most daring and innovative ideas proposed in response to last year’s call. This funding is part of the EU research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020. “The new grantees will carry out their projects at universities and research centres across 20 EU Member States and associated countries with Germany (35), UK (34) and France (21) hosting most grants”, the ERC reports.

Alice Guionnet who is currently a Director of Research (CNRS) at ENS Lyon, is known for her work in probability theory, in particular on large random matrices.

She has received the ERC Advanced Grant for a project entitled “Large Deviations in Random Matrix Theory – LDRaM”. To find out more about here research areas, both current and past, see https://8ecm.si/program/plenary-speakers/6

At the 8ECM Alice Guionnet will deliver the 2020 Bernoulli - EMS Lecture (nominated by the Bernoulli Society).

János Pach is Research Adviser at Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest and Head of the Laboratory of Combinatorial and Geometric Structures at MIPT, Moscow. He received the ERC Advanced Grant for a project entitled “From Geometry to Combinatorics and Back: Escaping the Curse of Dimensionality – GeoScape”.

His main fields of interest are discrete and computational geometry, convexity, and combinatorics. In 1981, he solved Ulam's problem, showing that there exists no universal planar graph. His research on geometric intersection patterns and semi-algebraic graphs in the last ten years has opened new avenuess in extremal combinatorics.